Not to make this blog all East Asia, all the time, but hey, it’s what’s catching my attention right now. It turns out there was a lot more fallout from the local NC protest/counter-protest I mentioned last week. A Chinese undergraduate somehow ended up between the two groups, apparently trying to get them to actually talk to one another rather than just competing over who could yell slogans loudest, and, well, things went downhill for her from there.

Some people posted an account of her actions to the Chinese student and scholar listserv I mentioned before as having organized the counter-protest. Outraged messages followed calling her a traitor. Then people posted her picture… and her name, her Chinese identity card number, her US address and email, her parents home and work addresses in China, a map to their house, and pictures of their front door. One of my colleagues has friends in the student’s hometown, and they called over the weekend to ask what the student had done to get rocks thrown through her parents’ windows. News of this has now made:

Interestingly, the two articles that came out today do not mention at all the event that took place last night, which the NY Times reporter attended sitting next to the threatened student. It was a panel discussion set up to address the contentious issues surrounding Tibet (and to some extent the Olympics as well) in a calm, rational setting. Though seven campus police officers had been arranged for security, the entire thing went very smoothly, with no heckling or interruptions of any kind during the speakers’ presentations, nor during the Q&A. The campus paper has a reasonably good report of the overall points that speakers made here: Panelists Stress Trust, Sincerity.